Photon Mapping

[jahrain]

Jahrain, can the mental ray lightmapping like..permanently bake bump maps?
say If I put a lolmassive hi res normal map that tiles like 5 times on my cliffs, on a map intended for CE, would it like, make them look perma bump mapped? I've always wondered if theres a way to get my nice cliff bumps to show off without making a lolhuge dynamic light.

Yes, you can bake normal maps onto textures. I actually used that technique to not bump, but just render smoothened lighting onto my lightmaps so it won't look so low poly in the baked lightmaps. But you can't make too lolmassive sized bitmaps or else they won't compile as there is a restriction in the size a bitmap tag can be. So trying to bake a detailed 16384 x 16384 bump baked terrain lightmap bitmap just won't work. But as for baking large normal maps onto the textures for things like cliff details, it would work on a average sized lightmap bitmap. But the thing is, you need to custom make the normal map first to fit the preset lightmap UVs, you can't just bake a tiled bumpmap from the original texture layout onto it without a hell of a lot of hassles.

You would have an easier time trying to get pseudo dynamic bump maps just baking the bump map onto the original texture itself. Look at some of my textures in Prime for example.